


Never Drink With Russians

by aseaofhoney



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: (basically truth or dare but not really), Accidental Bonding, Alcohol, Awkward Conversations, Drunken Confessions, Multi, Post-Book: Broken Homes, Truth or Dare, bit of an expansion on that time they tried to get varvara drunk and it backfired, gratuitous angst over dead husbands, nightingale and varvara have a lot in common
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-10 18:01:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19909909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aseaofhoney/pseuds/aseaofhoney
Summary: " He nodded, and she dropped her arm back into her own lap with a thud. 'mm'Kay. Question for question. You get to ask me and I will answer, but you have to answer me too. Deal?' "---It's mentioned briefly that one of the strategies Peter and Nightingale use to try and get information about the Faceless Man out of Varvara is Copious Amounts Of Alcohol, so I just took that and ran with it to a bunch of unexpected places.





	Never Drink With Russians

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in a fit of mad inspiration at the tail end of a 15-hour train journey and edited it sleep-deprived the next morning so make of it what you will yall

It became apparent somewhere around the third whiskey that getting their Russian prisoner drunk had been a very bad idea.

Oh she'd talked, and she'd talked plenty, but none of it had anything to do with her previous employer or the crimes she had committed at his behest -- most of it was about 80's music, and the state of the Russian women's international football team, and while she had briefly mentioned a person named Jonathan who may or may not be from Belarus, the way she'd swiftly changed the topic could as likely mean secrecy as it could drunken distraction. With the amount that Peter and himself had drank to keep up with her, the three of them had put a considerable dent in the Folly's reserve.

Now there were bottles scattered on the table in pools of spilt drink, amber in the reflected firelight, and Varvara had declared herself victorious.

'She's -- _hic_ \-- right,' Peter slurred out, making to stand but swaying worryingly. 'W-were fools to try... 'n'am going to bed.' At which declaration he keeled over with a thud and did not get back up.

'Peter? Hmmyou okay?'

No response but a faint snoring.

'Ha!' Varvara pointed to where he lay out of sight behind the table. 'Can't hANDLE hees liquor.'

Under normal circumstances her accent was immaculate, but now her vowels were beginning to stagger all over the place.

Much like himself as he tried to round the table. 'Help me get him to bed.'

Varvara, traitorous criminal that she was, giggled. He tried to shoot her a withering glare but feared the effect was somewhat deadened by his inability to actually focus on her head.

To her credit she did assist him in hauling a thoroughly unconscious Peter to his feet. 'Wheech issszz his room?'

's'Upstairs.'

She swore, somehow managing to take the word "fuck" on a tour through every conceivable vowel sound in the human vernacular.

He echoed her sentiments. Peter was taller and heavier than them both and offered no help when it came to keeping him upright. 'His head may huurt in the morning,' she huffed out as they took the stairs one struggle-laden step at a time. 'But my legs are going to _kill_ me. Can't Molly do this? Is she not _suoperneturally_ strong?'

'Mmm. No. Sh'doesn't like me drinking.'

'What'sz the deal with you two?'

Half way up the last staircase. 'Very old friends.'

'Peter said, that your old colleagues thought you two were --' she slurred a word in Russian that he was extremely glad he didn't recognise, though the tone conveyed its vulgarity.

'Gossip is. Gossip is, well. ‘S’gossip.' Four more stairs to go.

She snorted. 'Thought szo. She's not yuour _type_ , right?'

It was only because he was so drunk that he took the bait. 's'That supposed to mean?'

'HmmmMmm you know. Because you're gay.'

They'd reached the top of the stairs. He stopped dead, his balance swaying into the dark corridor ahead and back over the precipice of the staircase behind them.

'...Thomas?'

Under normal circumstances he would be able to brush that off, but these were not normal circumstances. 'Please. Do me a favour, and never bring that up again, to anybody.' With any luck neither of them would remember this in the morning.

She was silent for a while. 'I'm sorry, didn't know it wasssss _sensitive_ topic.'

They started down the hallway towards Peter's room. Some part of his brain had broken loose thanks to the alcohol and was trying to panic, but he put a stop to it. He was above such fears even in this state.

Getting the three of them through the narrow doorway into the bedroom was a feat of engineering in itself, after which they unceremoniously dropped Peter into his bed, rolled him over slightly so he was less likely to suffocate, and made it as far as the hallway before collapsing against the closed door.

'Gaaaahh _fuck_.' Varvara began a tirade of Russian curses from the floor before levering herself up to sit next to him. 'Think I might be sobering up a bit.'

'Dr Walid thinks we have supernatural metaso-- mebato-- _metabolisms_.'

'He might have a point.'

'Usually does. Doesn't mean we need to listen.'

'Hehehe. Tell you what. Since this was your idea and it wasn't awful--' He tried to butt in and explain that actually Peter had had a lot to do with this particular foolish plan but she swung her arm wildly, landing a finger on his lips. 'Shush!' He tried to focus on the finger and immediately regretted it through a haze of dizziness. 'As I was saying, since this eevening was not terrible I think your efforts to interrogate me should not go unrewarded. I'll cut you a deal.'

He nodded, and she dropped her arm back into her own lap with a thud. 'mm'Kay. Question for question. You get to ask me and I will answer, but you have to answer me too. Deal?'

'Depends.'

'On what?'

'Well, I am ssssworn to protect this country and its secrets, so we must first agree that the rules of this game do not come before... before.... Laws.'

'Alright. I won't ask you to spill state secrets, now do we have deal?'

He had a good laugh to himself over how ridiculous the Russian grammar sounded in her nearly English accent before eventually agreeing.

'Right. First one. What is the Faceless Man's goal? Why blow up Skygarden?'

'HA! Waste of a question -- I don't know!' It was her turn to laugh at his expense, and when she did so it sounded a little like the cackle of a fairy-tale witch. 'For what it's worth though, I think he's mad. I think he's... movie villain mad. There's subtle ways, to get power. Easy ways. If he could do that then he could figure out those. If he was just greedy? He wouldn't have blown up fucking building. He's mad. And his plan will be mad too. My turn!'

She shifted so her shoulder was propped against the wall and she was facing him with the door to Peter's bedroom between them. 'Did you really kill a dozen fascists in that raid in '41? Single-handed? The name, the name escapes me but you know the one! We heard stories about it but I didn't know if they were true.'

'That was... what the summer? Summer of '41?'

'Yes!'

'The name escapes me too but yes, it was a nasty business. I think you might be right though, I think it was a dozen men -- caught them by surprise, that's the only reason I made it out of there. Lucky getaway.'

'What? "Lucky getaway"? No. I've fought you. There was no luck in that, you're just. Unstoppable.'

'I don't know if I should say thank you.'

'Hmmm. Yes.'

'Thank you.'

'Welcome. Your turn!'

'Okaayyyy,' the memories had distracted him. Varvara was born in '22, which would've made her 19 when that particular fight took place. Much younger than Peter was now. Practically a child. They'd never talked about the war, despite being some of the dwindling few left alive who remembered it, and it had never struck him that while they'd both fought, and both lost people, he had already spent his youth when it started whereas she had all but been snatched from a playground and placed on a battlefield.

'Thomas!' She snapped her fingers somewhere vaguely near his nose.

'Why don't you talk about your husband?'

She blinked.

'You told us you were married for more than ten years, yet you've never once mentioned your husband, even in passing.'

'I...’ she trailed off and looked away at some point in the middle distance, before taking a deep breath. ‘The war was over -- five years, when I met him. I was going by Vivienne Tamlin, my lovely English name, and he was Andrew Wicklow. Andy to his work friends, Wickett to his old school friends. I loved him. I loved him more than I loved life. More than I loved myself, by far. And I was happy, I was so _happy_ , but…

‘We knew it was coming. The illness was in his family, his mother warned me when we were engaged that there was a chance but I didn't care. I wanted to be his wife, I didn’t care if I ended up his widow. I was thirty when we married. Forty one when he died. Those last six months, they were like the build-up to a funeral for a man who wasn't yet dead -- every time I saw him I knew, we both knew, he had so little time left, and we ought to make preparations. When there were no preparations left to make, that was the worst of all. Just waiting. I did everything around the house, he was too weak to help, and when he died I... I just kept doing it. Cleaning plates he hadn't eaten from in weeks, months. I didn't know what else to do. For three years, I didn't know what else to do.

‘Until one day, I'd just put a load in the washing machine -- my clothes and his, that were still clean from the last time, still unworn -- and I sat on the kitchen floor and watched them go round. That was the only time I would get to hold him. The sleeve of my jumper caught on the collar of his shirt. I hung out the washing and then, from inside, I thought I saw him standing in the garden -- but it was just his shirt in the breeze. Moving like it was underwater.

‘There was a time we stayed with his mother in her house on the coast, and we drove down to the beach on a midsummer night to swim in the Atlantic. Well, he wanted to swim, I wanted to stretch out on a blanket and watch the waves and do... other things. So I ended up standing in the surf, half in half out, wanting to be with him but not wanting to leave the shore. And that day I realised I was still standing there, Thomas, in my kitchen, in the surf with the waves around my knees. I couldn't swim out to him. He was never coming back. And right until then, it had never occurred to me that I could just... walk away. Back to shore. That was one week before I stopped aging. I'm not Vivienne Wicklow anymore. I walked away from that life, and I can't go back. It took me a long time and a lot of acid to find out who I the hell I wanted to be, but I did, and I’m happy again. I loved my husband, but the girl who married him is lost somewhere deep inside me and she's never coming back out.'

He was sure she’d blame the drink for the tears in her eyes.

'Your turn to ask a question.'

She laughed a wet laugh and wiped at her face with her sleeve, a futile gesture as more tears tracked down her smiling cheeks. 'Okay,' her voice sounded soft and raw. 'Have you ever been in love?'

'Yes. Once.'

She waited, but nothing more came. 'I swear to secrecy and all that, I promise. I've kept bigger secrets than yours, Thomas.'

'... His name was David Mellenby. And I... we were in love, for a very long time before either of us got the nerve up to do anything about it. He died in '45.’

'At Ettersberg?'

'No, actually. He --' it was not often he talked about David. The words did not come easily. 'He killed himself.'

'I'm sorry.' 'It's all a long time ago now.'

'I'm still sorry. Your turn. Ask me anything.'

'Did you know about Lesley?'

She screwed up her face and shrugged. ‘Didn’t _know._ I thought there was something off about her though. Seemed very suspicious. But had the Faceless Man told me she was working for him? No.’

There was a brief exchange of warning looks as he sensed from Varvara's expression that whatever she was about to ask would not be easy to answer, but she persisted regardless.

'Does Peter know you're gay?'

'Wh- What? Why in God's name would he? What kind of --'

'First of all that absolutely counts as your question for next turn, second: because he is your colleague, your friend, you work together every day and live in the same building... He can be dense sometimes, but the man's still a detective.'

'Technically he's a police constable.'

'You get my point!'

'I... No, he doesn't, to answer your question, and say no more on the matter.'

'And since you used your turn already, my next question is: why not?'

'I see no reason why I need to be discussing my private life with some, random --'

'Hey! We had a deal! If you don't want to answer and you have a half-decent reason then say so but you can't back out of this now, unless you're scared, are you?'

'So what if I am!' he snapped, and that shut her up immediately. 'People, people love to say that "times have changed" but I have lived a very long time, and I have seen times change back and forth on a whim and if I've learned one thing it's that the less people know, the easier life is. For everyone.'

She looked at him in silence for a while, and he wished he was sober enough to work out what she was thinking. Or what he was thinking, for that matter.

Finally, she spoke. 'I understand.'

'Understand... what?'

'…You know none of this is going anywhere, right?'

'What do you mean?'

'Shh. Listen.'

He did as he was told, and listened. At first, he heard nothing, but then sounds began to sort themselves from the silence. The creak of the wood in an old building. Peter’s heavy breathing from behind the door. Somewhere down below the muffled clank of glass as Molly cleaned up the mess they’d left, and a skittering that was Toby following her hoping for scraps.

The sounds of a living, breathing, household.

Varvara leaned closer, and looked him directly in the eye. ‘Between you and me, Thomas? The bombs aren’t falling anymore. You don’t have to wake up every morning and count what you’ve lost. Now,’ she levered herself up from the floor, swayed slightly on her feet, then took a step down the corridor. ‘Unless you have anything else to ask I am going the fuck to bed. Goodnight, Thomas.’

‘… Goodnight.’ Was all he could say in return. Going to bed seemed like the only good idea any of them had had all night.

**Author's Note:**

> if you can spot which part of this is ripped off of a Kate Bush song I'll be in awe


End file.
